Weekly Column – Page 176

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Canada Decides to Further Review Risks of Radioactive Waste Dump on Great Lakes Shore

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

On November 27, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extended the timeline to issue a decision on the proposed Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) project by 90 days from December 2, 2015 to March 1, 2016.

The proposal by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is to construct and operate a deep underground disposal facility at the Bruce Nuclear Site, on the shore of Lake Huron on Bruce Peninsula, Ontario. The DGR would be designed to manage low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the operation of OPG-owned nuclear reactors at Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington, Ontario.

“We are deeply thankful to all the US Congress Members who urged that the decision be postponed, and the Honorable Catherine McKenna, the newly appointed Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change, for postponing the decision 90 days,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, which has helped lead US grassroots resistance to the proposal.

“We urge the delegation of 32 US Senators and Representatives to follow through with securing a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister McKenna, to communicate the concerns and objections of tens of millions of US citizens regarding the risks the DGR would inflict on the Great Lakes,” Kamps said.

“We are confident that once Environment Minister McKenna reviews the 13 years of resistance to the DUD, she can do nothing other than reject OPG’s proposal as unacceptably risky to the drinking water supply for 40 million people,” Kamps added. DUD, for Deep Underground Dump, is the opposition’s term for the proposal.

In a November 18 letter to Environment Minister McKenna, a coalition of 65 US and Canadian environmental groups, including Nukewatch, urged an extension of the December 2 decision deadline. But its overriding gist was for Minister McKenna to reject the DGR proposal outright, as it is “plagued by uncertainties, unacceptably risky, unnecessary for the management of the radioactive wastes, and unaffordable from a cost-benefit perspective.”

The coalition’s letter listed the growing opposition, including 182 resolutions passed by municipalities in the US and Canada—including Chicago, Duluth, five communities in metro Detroit, and Toronto—with a combined population of nearly 23 million people. In addition, the National Association of Counties, representing 3,069 counties across the US where 255 million people reside, recently passed a resolution opposing the DGR, as has the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus (comprised of lawmakers in eight US states and two Canadian provinces).

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has long been critical of the DGR as well.

The organization Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump has more information about the growing number of resolutions posted on its website.

—Beyond Nuclear and Nukewatch

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear War Theme Parks: Mass Destruction for the Whole Family

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

In what looks like the establishment of state religion, government-funded monuments to nuclear weapons are popping up all over the country, and Minuteman missile sites are part of the scam.

Hoping perhaps to enshrine the myth that the “god of the underworld,” after which plutonium was named, can be transformed from a vengeful, self-destructive, nightmare demon, into a benign, peace-loving, fairy-tale prince, nuclear propagandists and their friends in Congress are establishing nuclear war theme parks—without the uncomfortable taint of mass destruction or Cold War hatreds—at former bomb factories and nuclear weapons launch pads.

Tours are being offered at the “B Reactor,” on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State which in 2008 was declared a National Historic Landmark. Plutonium production reactors for the nuclear arsenal were for decades sloppily operated there, releasing large amounts of airborne radioactive fallout and causing long-term pollution of groundwater which threatens the Columbia River.
A National Wildlife Refuge has been established at Rocky Flats, Colorado, outside Denver, where the machining of plutonium for nuclear bomb cores has poisoned dozens of square miles.
Near Fargo, North Dakota, the State Historical Society owns a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control center, dubbed “Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site,” and has opened it to tourism.
In South Dakota, the retired launch control center formerly named D-1 is now called the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and is run by the National Park Service. Visitors may go underground and personally simulate a nuclear missile launch.
Outside Tucson, Arizona, you can tour the Titan Missile Museum which opened in 1986 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994.
At White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, six hours from Washington, DC, the Greenbrier hideaway was built by the Dwight Eisenhower administration as a nuclear war fallout shelter for 1,000 people—including members of Congress and their families. The bunker came with a power generator, a 60-day supply of packaged food, a hospital, kitchen, dining room, waste disposal, and a dental operating room. However, a nuclear attack on the capital would have rendered evacuation impossible, the airport a smoldering ruin, and the trains unworkable. Today, deactivated and restored, the site is making money by charging visitors for tours.
This November, the Energy and Interior Departments launched a three-site National Historic Park named for the Manhattan Project—the secret World War II program that built atomic bombs that killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said in a 2011 press release, “Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb’s creation needs to be shared with this and future generations.”

Jarvis insults our intelligence by denying or feigning ignorance of the vast literature concerning the development and promotion of nuclear weapons. Available from any good library, histories by Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Hiroshima in America), Ward Wilson (Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons), and Gar Alperovitz (The Decision to us the Atomic Bomb) debunk the official white wash of the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (that incinerating cities “saved lives”). All these studies are informed by thorough consideration of formerly classified documents regarding use of the bomb, the threat to use it, and its long-term physiological, psychological, and ecological effects.

***

But the government wants us to forget this down-side, and at least two motives are at work.

First, by treating nuclear weapons nostalgically, the centers teach the sham lesson that H-bombs are a thing of the past. South Dakota’s park service website says about the doomsday tour: “At Minuteman Missile NHS, it is possible to learn how the threat of nuclear war came to haunt the world”—as if the Air Force’s 450 city-busting Minuteman III missiles aren’t still on alert, ready to attack, haunting the world. Further, the H-bomb monuments are often given the deceptively sly name of “Cold War memorials,” again treating the nuclear arsenal as a thing of the past, implying that the country’s 7,000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons have gone the way of the Berlin Wall.

Second, official memorials devoted to nuclear weapons self-consciously deny or rewrite the disastrously pollution-intensive and long-lived effects of foisting the Nuclear Age upon the world. This “Columbus Day” style of American history—lionizing heroic efforts and ignoring terrible crimes committed by the hero—is the sort that is being rendered almost as artwork at these idol-worshiping military memorials.

At these shrines, nobody will learn that the Bomb was used unnecessarily against civilians without warning, and tested in the atmosphere hundreds of times in ways that caused at least 75,000 thyroid cancers in the United States alone, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Students will have to look elsewhere to learn that H-bombs have been condemned by every major religion on Earth and that in 1996 a majority of the International Court of Justice declared that the mere threat to use them in a sneak attack or first strike (the “alert” status of our land- and submarine-based missiles maintain this threat) violates International Humanitarian Law.

Neither do the monuments ever acknowledge the Bomb’s legacy of persistent radioactive contamination and the nuclear industry’s resulting worldwide epidemic of radiation-induced cancers. Neither do the memorials note that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more controversial than any other historical crime of war.

Official US histories and wartime propaganda still claim that the two attacks “ended the war” by preventing a land invasion. This myth is referenced endlessly at the H-bomb monuments. Yet historical records unearthed since the bombings show that in August 1945, Japan was already defeated and, as the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946, would have surrendered “certainly prior to 31 December and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945,” without the nuclear bombings, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without a US invasion. Indeed, the mass destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was known in advance not to be necessary, as historian Gar Alperovitz has found.

In his book Mandate for Change, President Eisenhower wrote, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” And Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender….”

With the Obama Administration working now to complete three giant new nuclear weapon production facilities, we must also confront the utter uselessness of todays nuclear weapons. Even the late Paul Nitze, a founder of the anti-Soviet Committee on the Present Danger and former advisor to President Reagan did so. Writing in the New York Times long after the end of the Cold War, Nitze said:

“I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”

These are words to carve in stone at any atom bomb theme park.

—This essay is excerpted from Nuclear Heartland, Revised, published this fall by Nukewatch

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

St. Louis Blues

As Fire Inches toward Dump Site and Cancer Numbers Rise, Community Groups Push for Resolution of Manhattan Project Contamination

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

By Arianne Peterson

Current and former residents of North St. Louis County, Missouri—where tons of radioactively contaminated Manhattan Project waste were dumped starting in the 1940s—are gaining traction in their efforts to pressure leaders to take responsibility for the widespread contamination in their communities. Local organizers have made progress recently on two related, urgent issues: 1) Clean-up of waste dumped at the West Lake Landfill site, where an underground fire in the neighboring Bridgeton landfill is inching ever closer to the radioactive materials; and 2) Achieving recognition and support for those who have developed illnesses related to the contamination in and around Coldwater Creek, which runs through North St. Louis County.

West Lake Landfill

Concerned citizens including the group Just Moms STL and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment have successfully lobbied the state’s congressional delegation to introduce a bill (HR 4100) that would transfer remediation authority of the West Lake Landfill site—which holds over 40,000 tons of contaminated soil at surface level—from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Army Corps of Engineers. The bill was introduced November 25 with support from Representatives Ann Wagner and William Lacy Clay and Senators Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill.

The West Lake Landfill is just one of many sites in the St. Louis area contaminated by waste left over from uranium processing done by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works for the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. While clean-up of the other sites falls under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the West Lake site formerly did not meet the program’s criteria and instead was designated an EPA Superfund site.

But residents have not been happy with the EPA’s handling of the West Lake waste, which is about 1,000 feet away from a “subsurface smoldering event” that has been burning for over four years at the neighboring Bridgeton Landfill—owned by Republic Services. In 2008, the EPA Region 7 issued a Record of Decision saying it planned to leave the waste in place and cover it with a “cap” of rock, clay, and soil. In a press release about the new legislation, Representative Clay said, “It just makes no sense to allow radioactive waste to remain buried in an unlined landfill, near residential neighborhoods, schools, a hospital, the airport and the Missouri River. It’s time to clean up West Lake Landfill.”

Sen. Blunt said, “The EPA’s unacceptable delay in implementing a solution for the West Lake landfill has destroyed its credibility, and it is time to change course.”

Dawn Chapman of Just Moms STL expressed further frustration with the EPA, saying, “It was clear in May—when head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, refused to meet with Just Moms STL even after a bipartisan letter was written requesting such a meeting—that EPA’s main focus remained on public relations rather than on being an advocate for our children.”

Just Moms STL has higher hopes for FUSRAP, which is handling the city’s other Manhattan Project waste cleanup sites, but the group recognizes it has a long way to go before their community is made safe. Group member Karen Nickel said, “While we see this as a victory, we still have families living within one mile of this dangerous site, we still have radioactive trees offsite, and we still have an out-of-control burning Superfund site/landfill with very hazardous materials.”

Local residents certainly have cause for concern. In 2014, the EPA released an analysis of what could happen if the underground fire reaches West Lake’s radioactive waste. The study said, “since no one knows what else is mixed in with the radioactive waste, a subsurface fire could potentially react with those unknown substances, causing an explosion.” It also found that high temperatures could cause the proposed cap over the waste to crack, and/or create a buildup of pressure that would force out radioactive gasses. A fire at West Lake would also cause more liquid to build up in the landfill, which could carry contamination away from the site and into groundwater. The EPA has promised to release its plan for dealing with the situation by the end of 2016.

In September 2015, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster released new reports supporting the state’s ongoing lawsuit against Bridgeton Landfill owner Republic Services for negligence and environmental violations related to the ongoing fire. Among the more alarming pieces of evidence added to the lawsuit, as reported by Missouri Public Radio, were:

Radiological and organic contamination has been detected in trees on properties neighboring the landfill;
Volatile organic compounds, also known as VOCs, have been found in “high concentrations” in the groundwater in wells outside the perimeter of the landfill. Those contaminants include benzene, acetone, and 2-butanone.
The underground “fire”—or high-temperature chemical reaction—in the Bridgeton Landfill is expanding north, toward the radioactive waste in the adjacent West Lake Landfill and has already moved beyond the gas interceptor wells in the “neck” of the landfill that are intended to stop its spread;
Republic Services has negligently contributed to the growth of the underground reaction by “aggressively over-extracting the gas system well outside industry best practices.”

The state’s suit was filed in 2013 and is scheduled for trial in March 2016. It seeks penalties, actual damages, and punitive damages from Republic Services for the company’s allegedly unlawful conduct.

Those who live near the landfills currently complain of headaches, nosebleeds, and horrible smells coming from the burning area. An unrelated brush fire at West Lake on October 24, and an 11,000-gallon sewage spill at Bridgeton October 27, only served to heighten local concerns about the management of the situation. St. Louis County officials, intending to reassure the public, released an emergency contingency plan in October outlining what to do if the fire reaches the waste. The plan only aggravated some residents’ concerns. Student activist Elaine Emmerich said, “There’s an official 104-page evacuation plan, but no one really knows what could happen [if the fire reaches the radioactive waste], since it all comes down to complete chance about which direction the winds are blowing that day.”

This meme, posted in 2013 on the Missouri Coalition for the Environment website, depicts the West Lake Landfill Manhattan Project waste dump site using the round radiation symbol in a series of maps. Each shows a potential disaster that threaten to disperse the more than 40,000 tons of radioactively contaminated soil that are stored at surface level in the unlined dump site.

The proposal to transfer control of West Lake from the EPA to FUSRAP [within the Department of Defense] does not alter the site’s Superfund status and does not transfer the liability of those potentially responsible for the damages. Based on the site’s history, the question of liability may boil down to a finger-pointing match between nuclear utility giant Exelon and the Department of Energy (DOE). Exelon holds the liability for the former Cotter Corporation, which hired the contractor that originally dumped the waste. The DOE retains liability for its predecessor the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which released Cotter Corp. from its license to hold the material despite knowing that it was dumped without authorization.

The radioactive material at West Lake includes 8,700 tons of barium sulfate left over from the Belgian Congo Pitch Blend uranium ore—after Mallinckrodt C.W. extracted its uranium for the Manhattan Project. Starting in 1946, 133,000 tons of these byproducts were dumped at the St. Louis Airport site. In 1962, the AEC auctioned off 125,000 tons of the Airport waste to private companies. Cotter Corp. acquired some of the material and shipped much of it back to its home state of Colorado, leaving 8,700 tons of barium sulfate—which contained several tons of uranium—at a site on Latty Avenue, near the Airport. In 1973, Cotter Corp. mixed this material with 40,000 tons of topsoil from the Latty Avenue site and hauled it in dump trucks to West Lake, telling the landfill operator they were bringing “clean fill” that could be used to cover other refuse.

In 1974, Cotter Corp. told the AEC that it was disposing of the material in a landfill. According to AEC records, the agency recommended citing Cotter for disobeying the intent of its regulations. However, later that same year, the AEC released Cotter from the license it held for the Latty Avenue materials. A month later, the AEC was dissolved, and its duties were assigned to the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The idea of taking action against the unauthorized dumping at West Lake apparently got lost in the transition.

Doug Clemens, chair of the community advisory group associated with the EPA cleanup, feels the DOE is shirking its responsibility for the West Lake waste. “This was permitted by the federal government and created by the federal government under a weapons program,” he said. “It’s their waste and they’re responsible for it.” The DOE had specifically excluded West Lake from the FUSRAP charged with cleaning up Manhattan Project sites, possibly because the material was owned by a private company. A 1993 DOE memo stated that the agency “remains firm in its position that it is not admitting liability for the West Lake Landfill contamination”; a 1992 memo called the West Lake dumping “a license violation” that “would not have been authorized if licensing approval had been sought.”

Kay Drey, who has researched the weapons waste in St. Louis since the 1970s and is a board member at Beyond Nuclear, feels the US government has both a moral and fiscal responsibility for cleaning up the waste produced by its weapons program. “To me, it’s very clear that this was a federal responsibility,” she told St. Louis Today. “Unfortunately, the Atomic Energy Commission and the NRC didn’t follow through and pay attention to what was at Latty Avenue and then dumped at West Lake Landfill.”

Coldwater Creek Contamination

The same uranium processing waste generated by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works for atomic bomb production that was dumped at West Lake was dumped in many other sites as well, and residents who were exposed to radiation in the 1970s and 1980s—many of whom came in regular contact with Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River—are now facing an alarming number of rare illnesses.

After years of organizing efforts to put pressure on government officials to take responsibility for the devastating effects thought to stem from residents’ exposure, activists with Coldwater Creek Facts have succeeded in involving the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in studying their case. In the agency’s first meeting with community members December 2, officials reassured them that their investigation would not be influenced by other government agencies that may seek to avoid responsibility for the problem. Erin Evans, an ADSTR environmental health specialist, told residents, “We are an independent, non-regulatory agency. I get my pressure from you.” She also said, “Hopefully this helps us say these illnesses that we’re seeing in this community may have been caused by this environmental contamination.”

2015 map of illnesses suffered by current and former residents who lived near Coldwater Creek. From www.coldwatercreekfacts.com.

In 2011, current and former residents of the area who grew up near the Creek in the 1970s and 1980s began to notice a high incidence of rare cancers among their relatively young peer group. They started a Facebook group called “Coldwater Creek—Just the Facts Please” to reach out to others who were experiencing similar health issues and begin gathering data. Four years later, the group has over 12,000 members and has documented 2,725 cases of cancers and autoimmune diseases. Forty-five of these are cases of appendix cancer, which is staggering considering the regular incidence of this disease is less than one in 100,000.

A 2013 study by the Missouri Department of Health effectively dismissed the group’s concerns, attributing the high cancer rates to lifestyle factors like smoking and poor diet. After pointing out the flaws of the study, which only considered the diseases diagnosed among those who lived near the Creek from 1996 to 2004—after cleanup efforts were well underway—and failed to consider the major portion of the population that had moved away from the area since their exposure.

Members of the group hope the ATSDR study—which is expected to take 18 to 24 months—will bring them closer to gaining some federal support for those suffering from the effects of contamination resulting from the government’s atomic bomb production. The group is pushing the federal government to recognize their “Downwinder” status under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for those suffering from radiation exposure stemming from the government’s Manhattan Project. RECA, administered by the Department of Justice, entitles those it recognizes as having contracted certain diseases after exposure to up to $100,000 in damages.

Organizers are also working to educate health care professionals in the area on the effects of residents’ exposure and how to best serve this unique population. On November 30, St. Louis County Public Health Director Faisal Khan responded to community concerns and published a blog post addressing area physicians, sharing recommendations for action and educational resources.

While they keep pressure on federal, state, and local authorities, group members continue to advocate for and support each other through their Facebook page, which contains four years’ worth of devastating stories from those who are sick themselves and/or have lost loved ones to cancer and other diseases. A comment posted by Facebook user Julie Winters on October 22 is a typical post for the page: “My sister died at age 30 from liver cancer. My Mother at 55 from ovarian cancer. My Father age 58 from lung cancer. And last, I had triple negative breast cancer at 45. The stupid creek ran behind our house and I use to catch tadpoles as a kid…….until they suddenly all disappeared. Hmmmm. What do you all think??? Insane!!”

The Coldwater Creek contamination is recognized under FUSRAP, and the Army Corps of Engineers is working to clean up the sources of its contamination. Meanwhile, many current residents living near both the Creek and the West Lake Landfill are struggling to figure out how to move their families away from the radiation given the reality that no one is likely to want to buy or live in their homes. Though both groups are engaged in a fight for their lives, they recognize that their struggles stem from a much bigger problem: the criminal negligence of the federal governments nuclear weapons program. As Facebook user Scott Koeneman posted on the Coldwater Creek page December 2: “All I know is this: West Lake Landfill, and Coldwater Creek, both have, or had, the exact same waste buried in it that my grandfather worked on during the Manhattan Project & the Cold War at Mallinckrodt. It’s the same waste that killed him, and it’s the same waste that is killing you.”

Sources: St. Louis Public Radio, Mar. 31, 2014, Sept. 3 & Nov. 3, 2015; Missouri Attorney General Press Release, Sept. 3; Quartz, Oct. 29; STL Today, Nov. 2; Student Life (WashU), Nov. 9; Byron DeLear Interview on Antidote (YouTube), Nov. 9; KDSK News, Nov. 10; PoliticalNews, Nov. 25; Washington Univ. Institute for Public Health Blog, Nov. 30; St. Louis American, Dec. 3; AP, Dec. 4; US Dept. of Justice RECA Website, Dec. 4, 2015

Editor’s Note: Nukewatch has reported on both the Coldwater Creek contamination and the West Lake dump site regularly in the Quarterly since 2013. We are encouraged by the recent progress made by these citizens’ groups as well as the increased media coverage their struggle is now receiving.

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Truck Watch Finds Hot Spots in Unlikely Places

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Photos & story by Martha Kaempffer & Bonnie Urfer

We set off on a Truck Watch trip on October 26. The goal was to uncover radioactive trucks on the highways, at truck stops, or entering or leaving a dump facility. The journey was reminiscent of the work done by Sam Day and so many others when we monitored nuclear traffic at Oak Ridge, Tennessee for the first time, decades ago. We didn’t know what we were doing and it took years to perfect our technique and build a network. Eventually, activists did an amazing job of informing the public about nuclear weapons transports or “H-bomb trucks” on the roads. Our recent journey was just the first of many Truck Watches to come and we have a lot to learn.

Our first destination was the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) dump near Andrews, in West Texas, which is located adjacent to the URENCO uranium enrichment factory on Texas County Highway 87. WCS takes low-level radioactive waste from the government and other rad-waste producers around the country. We checked truck stops where we walked up and down rows of semis, walking our dog Camper and holding the radiation detector close to trailers. We found nothing out of the ordinary. We did not come across a truck leaking radiation on this trip, but our Radalert did alert us to plenty of radioactive places.

In northwest Wisconsin, home to Nukewatch, ambient radiation averages around 10 counts per minute (cpm). Readings at WCS averaged in the low 20s. Road construction at the entrance of WCS prevented us from parking and closely monitoring traffic entering and leaving the site. We sat in a safe area about a mile down the road from the site but unfortunately missed a load that made the Radalert jump. After a day of monitoring and surveying we moved on and headed toward Carlsbad, New Mexico, home to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), where the Energy Department is burying high-level military waste deep underground.

We traveled west and came across a road going south to WIPP, but, oddly, we didn’t see the road sign declaring: “Restricted.” That is where we got the photo (below) of waste canisters accumulating in a parking lot. WIPP was closed in February 2014 due to an explosion of a 55-gallon drum in one of its underground chambers and the consequent contamination of workers there. Passing through the town of Carlsbad, the Radalert radiation monitor jumped to 40 cpm, but we did not see a truck or find the source of the radiation.

We then visited Los Alamos, New Mexico, which calls itself The Atomic City and is the site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that designs hydrogen bombs. Following is Martha’s impression of seeing it for the first time:

This eerie place used to be a “closed city”—off limits to anyone who did not work on weapon design and manufacturing there. Now it’s a tourist destination with a visitor’s center full of wartime sloganeering like “Talk Means Trouble: Don’t Talk” and “Silence So They Survive,” and a selection of Atomic City T-shirts showcasing H-bomb “art” like a massive mushroom cloud over the declaration,“It’s a blast!” Nearby there’s a large advertisement for the exciting new Manhattan Project National Historic Park that opened a week after we were there. We drove through the city and passed the public transportation hub which is called “Atomic City Transit,” the local gym, “Fusion Multisport,” and streets with names like Gamma Ray, Nuclear Street, Mercury Road, Eniwetok Drive and Bikini Atoll Road. In a tourist shop we found shot glasses printed with outlines of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” (the nicknames of the given the bombs we dropped in Japan), more T-shirts, and even Atomic City Salsa.

Having not been alive in the mid-’80s when protests and actions at the Nevada Test Site and Oak Ridge, Tenn. took place regularly, this was my first time entering such a place and I can say that my jaw was hanging open the entire way through Los Alamos. The glorification of the bomb was undeniable and sickening. I felt as if I were in some other worldly place where everyone was brainwashed and I was the “conscious” spy. I was nauseated over the veneration of these weapons used to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of innocent mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. I just wanted to shout out loud in the middle of the visitor’s center, “Do you know what these bombs did? What they could do at any moment? These ‘casualties’ are real human beings that matter.” Somehow I managed to refrain due to the creepy accepting nature of the locals.

We passed through a check-point (frankly I’m amazed that Bonnie managed to pass inspection) and drove through the entire LANL weapons facility checking things out and getting readings (in the low-20s throughout the complex) and photographs. Although we noticed very little truck traffic, we did find a few excellent places for monitoring trucks and plan to return.

The following day, we took some back roads through Church Rock, New Mexico, the site of the massive 1979 uranium mine waste spill in which over 1,100 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 93 million gallons of acidic, radioactively contaminated liquid flowed into the Puerco River and traveled 80 miles downstream through Navajo lands. The wall of water reportedly overwhelmed sewers and lifted manhole covers 20 miles down river in Gallop.Days passed before residents and river-goers were notified of the spill, allowing plenty of time for children to swim in and livestock to drink the water which was contaminated to 7,000 times that of “safe” water.

We were able to drive right alongside the now dried up riverbed and see old tailings piles and abandoned United Nuclear buildings. We may have done a bit of slight trespassing in order to get readings from down in the riverbed. Once down there the highest reading was 34 cpm. Other than a large jackrabbit we did not see any other notable traffic and moved on to the Nevada Test Site.

As the road narrowed to just single lanes near Creech Air Force Base and the Test Site, we had our Radalert out and checked trucks coming in the opposite direction and as we passed them. Just a week and a half prior to our being there, a massive explosion had taken place at Beatty near the Test Site and they had closed down 140 miles of Highway 95, the road we were on, as a result. (See cover.) We wanted to get readings along the way to see how much had been contaminated. They were fairly consistent in the low 20s. Although we witnessed a drone landing at Creech AFB and happened along some wild desert horses while parked along the side of the road monitoring trucks, we found nothing more.

Transport canisters of highly radioactive wastes are backing up at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, after a burst container poisoned workers and spread plutonium and americium through the underground chambers and into the atmosphere outside. Nukewatch photo.

After Nevada, we headed back toward home up through Utah and Colorado. While driving east through Colorado on I-70, we passed through a tiny near-ghost-town called Silver Plume. Suddenly we had a reading of 60 cpm. This reading was shocking because only gamma radiation is the sort that can pass through the body of the car, and gamma radiation should not be coming off silver mine waste.

We looked all around us and found no suspicious vehicles so we pressed on and, as we were driving on a mountain road with small towns, we didn’t stop to investigate the area. That night we made it to Boulder, and at a dog park there with Camper, we sat and researched the histories of Silver Plume and Georgetown. We didn’t find records of anything but gold and silver ever being mined there.

Even inside our car—as well on the top of a pile of silver mine waste in the near ghost-town of Silver Plume, Colorado (pictured)—our Radalert reported relatively high counts-per-minute.

The next day we returned to Silver Plume for more readings. Radiation levels were fairly high along the way—in the 30s and 40s—but we couldn’t find any specific sources. A quick stop at the village welcome center in Georgetown pointed us to a hiking trail—the “7:30 Trail”—which used to be an old silver mine track. We were told that tailings piles were all along the road. We parked on the gravel Main Street in Silver Plume and followed the directions up the mountain. Before we even got to the trailhead, we found a few piles next to each other equaling one massive tailings pile. Walking up the mountain our cpm readings jumped from the high 40s and 50s, to 62 cpm on top of the tailings pile. Bonnie called the local newspaper and chatted with a reporter. Martha—hearing voices coming up the trail we had just climbed— asked the hikers if they had any information on what was being mined and whether they had been told that the area was so “hot.” They in turn asked if high radiation levels were a bad thing! They continued up the 7:30 Trail, a walk that would take them past numerous tailings piles.

In the town of Silver Plume, Colo. ambient counts-per-minute on our Radalert monitor are five times the average at the Nukewatch office in Wisconsin.

After taking pictures and Radalert readings we went back to the car and passed a sheriff parked in town and asked if he had a moment to talk. We told him about our findings. His friendly response was essentially that he “wasn’t surprised.” He pointed us toward the county Health Department one town over. We stopped there too but the woman in charge was out so we were given her business card and sent on our way. Having gathered some alarming information, contacted the media and the local police, we decided to continue home.

Our return journey was uneventful although we did pass a few Minuteman III missile silos in Wyoming and stopped to take pictures. The missile silos are still quite unnerving due to the barrenness of the landscape, the scant number of other people around, and the presence of all of the security cameras.

More Truck Watches Needed

Lively discussions about our trip take place frequently in the Nukewatch office. We want to continue our investigation and expand the Truck Watch. To make it better, we need to raise money. Please consider donating to our Truck Watch Campaign to support more research and future trips. We also need volunteers to investigate with us. We need further investigation of the gamma source radiation at Silver Plume. We need equipment upgrades. Radioactive waste trucks move from facility to factory, on trains and trucks—it’s a business to be concerned about. It’s a business that affects everyone. We have so much more to do.

Radioactive Waste Transport Notes

On Sept. 29, the congressional representative whose district includes Andrews, Texas—Republican Mike Conaway—filed legislation called the Interim Consolidated Storage Act of 2015, which would change the current Nuclear Waste Policy Act to allow the US Department of Energy to take ownership of spent nuclear fuel and contract with private companies—like Andrews-based Waste Control Specialists (WCS)—to store it. The bill is currently under committee review. Approval for spent fuel storage by WCS or its New Mexican rival proposed by Holtec would cause large amounts of high-level spent fuel to be transported from all across the country to a centralized site.
In addition to the low-level waste traveling on our highways and railways daily, more than 3,000 used nuclear fuel shipments have been made covering a total distance of over 1.5 million miles in the past 40 years, according to a 2009 report by the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Association.
Concerned about a 20-ton spent fuel rod shipment possibly headed from Virginia to Tennessee, three nuclear watchdog groups—Savannah River Site Watch (SC), Snake River Alliance Education Fund (ID), and the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (TN)—filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November. The groups are asking for more information about the timing and specific route the fuel rods will take as they travel across the country.
Correction: In the cover article of the Fall 2015 Quarterly (“Nukewatch Plans Truck Watch…”), we referred to the private waste dump operated by Waste Control Specialists in Texas as “the only open storage facility in the US.” Three other low-level waste disposal sites have current licenses with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Barnwell in South Carolina, operated by EnergySolutions, which only accepts waste from Atlantic compact states; a US Ecology site in Richland, Washington accepting waste from the Rocky Mountain and Northwest compact states; and the EnergySolutions site in Clive, Utah, which accepts waste from all regions of the US.

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Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

As Fire Inches toward Dump Site and Cancer Numbers Rise, Community Groups Push for Resolution of Manhattan Project Contamination

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

By Arianne Peterson

West Lake Landfill

Coldwater Creek Contamination

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Photos & story by Martha Kaempffer & Bonnie Urfer

More Truck Watches Needed

Radioactive Waste Transport Notes

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